The White House has promised swift action on homelessness. It aims to dismantle encampments, force addicts and the mentally ill into treatment, and yank federal funds from cities that refuse to police tents and open-air drug use. For residents exasperated by sidewalk squalor, that sounds like overdue toughness.
In reality, casting the homeless as nothing more than a public nuisance understates the crisis and diverts money and attention from the broader solutions that are needed.
Encampments are only the visible edge of a wider emergency. About two-thirds of unhoused Americans spend nights in cars, motels or overcrowded shelters. From 2023 to last year, the number of people experiencing homelessness nationally jumped 18 percent, with the fastest growth among families. Behind those numbers is a structural shortage of low-rent homes — more than 7 million units by the latest count — while Medicaid and mental-health systems remain threadbare and under attack from US President Donald Trump’s administration.
There are no quick fixes, but progress is possible. Since 2009, veteran homelessness has fallen 55 percent because the US Congress paired long-term rent subsidies with case management and healthcare through a single, accountable system. Houston used the same “housing first” formula, with placement in permanent housing plus voluntary services, to cut its homeless count by more than 60 percent.
Similar methods have worked well in cities abroad. For example, Helsinki used them to push street homelessness to near zero (until recent cuts to support let it reappear).
All successful programs recognize that stable shelter is essential. A settled address is a place to sleep in safety, use medicines as directed, and store important documents and belongings. Randomized trials have shown that housing-first approaches, especially when linked with health and other services, work better for many of the homeless — and far less expensively — than rotating people through emergency wards and county jails.
Short-term rental aid, emergency cash after a job loss and legal help in preventing evictions all reduce entries into shelters. States and cities should reform the zoning rules that throttle construction of small, inexpensive apartments.
Federal housing vouchers — which help offset housing costs for about 2 million low-income households — are effective, but demand dwarfs supply and most eligible families never get them. Studies show that vouchers do not deter work, and the cost is less than what would otherwise be spent on recurring emergency-room visits, police interventions and stays in jail.
Granted, these approaches are most likely to succeed with those in shelters; tackling chronic street homelessness is harder, because mental illness and drug addiction play a bigger role.
The White House’s plan concentrates on that second group. It seeks to bar federal housing help from anyone who cannot pass a sobriety test and funnels dollars from prevention to policing. It urges states to expand “civil commitments” without saying where the subjects would be sent, how they would be treated or how they would eventually exit.
The focus on street homelessness, which amounts to a breakdown of public order, is understandable, and more civil commitments to medical facilities are necessary. However, residential treatments for addiction and mental illness are not cheap. More funding is needed.
Short of compulsory removal, mobile health teams that pair clinicians with outreach workers can reduce street homelessness cost-effectively, reducing emergency calls and arrests.
The public’s impatience with homelessness and the disorder that goes with it is justified, but simply hiding the homeless is not the answer. The right kind of help — housing plus treatment and other services — is not just more humane. Anything less is bound to fail.
The Bloomberg Editorial Board publishes the views of the editors across a range of national and global affairs.
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
The last foreign delegation Nicolas Maduro met before he went to bed Friday night (January 2) was led by China’s top Latin America diplomat. “I had a pleasant meeting with Qiu Xiaoqi (邱小琪), Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping (習近平),” Venezuela’s soon-to-be ex-president tweeted on Telegram, “and we reaffirmed our commitment to the strategic relationship that is progressing and strengthening in various areas for building a multipolar world of development and peace.” Judging by how minutely the Central Intelligence Agency was monitoring Maduro’s every move on Friday, President Trump himself was certainly aware of Maduro’s felicitations to his Chinese guest. Just
On today’s page, Masahiro Matsumura, a professor of international politics and national security at St Andrew’s University in Osaka, questions the viability and advisability of the government’s proposed “T-Dome” missile defense system. Matsumura writes that Taiwan’s military budget would be better allocated elsewhere, and cautions against the temptation to allow politics to trump strategic sense. What he does not do is question whether Taiwan needs to increase its defense capabilities. “Given the accelerating pace of Beijing’s military buildup and political coercion ... [Taiwan] cannot afford inaction,” he writes. A rational, robust debate over the specifics, not the scale or the necessity,
RSS